Where are you when it

Thursday, February 6, 2003 at 1:00am

A line in the explosive climax of Pearl Cleage's play Bourbon at the Border blew me away. Up to that point in the performance I was caught up in the recreation of the civil rights era, the setting of Cleage's dramatic portrayal of a Detroit couple's reunification after the husband, Charlie, returns home to his wife, May, following months in a mental rehabilitation hospital.

In their youth, the couple had been Freedom Riders, traveling to Mississippi to register voters. But Cleage, whose father was deeply involved in the civil rights movement, doesn't celebrate the rhetoric of that effort. Instead, she gives us an intimate look at a forgotten side of the movement